FORUM ON BEER, HOMEBREWING, AND RELATED ISSUES
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Contents:
Re: Cider (Tim Bray)
RE: Mmmm! Cider! (Joe Dunne)
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Date: Wed, 01 Sep 2010 09:44:21 -0700
From: Tim Bray <tbray at wildblue.net>
Subject: Re: Cider
When I make cider I go out of my way to make sure I get 'tart blend'
fresh cider to start with.
I find hard cider made from predominately sweet varieties of apples
to be a pretty bland drink.
All dessert varieties (table fruit) are predominantly sweet, but
most of them also have acidity to balance the sugars, otherwise
they taste insipid, like Red Delicious, which has very little
acidity and also very little flavor. If you use juice from
insipid apples you get an insipid cider. But most dessert apples
(those you can eat out of hand) have enough acidity to make them
taste good with all the sugar; when you ferment the sugar away,
the resulting cider is over-acidic. For my taste, anyway. If you
backsweeten, this is not the case - then you need more acid to
balance the sugar again.
I suspect the blandness you note is from lack of tannins and lack
of flavor, rather than lack of tartness. Tannins give cider body
and complexity, and are almost completely absent from most "apple
cider" juices from modern orchards.
In fact, traditionally, cider makers
have blended in the juice of tart 'crabapple' varieties to achieve a
good result for hard cider.
The main reason to add crabs is to get tannin, which dessert
apples lack; and to get complexity, which dessert apples also
lack. If your juice has low acidity, crabs will definitely bump
that up, but typically you can only add about 10% crabs before the
acidity gets too high.
I target around 0.3% to 0.5% titratable acidity. More than 0.5%
and it gets too 'sharp' for my taste. Apple character comes
through best at around 0.35%, but that may be partly because I
also have significant tannins. (I grow cider apples to get
tannin, but most people are going to have a hard time finding that
kind of juice.) Using commercial apple juice you probably want
about 0.5%, but much more than that and it will be quite sharp.
In the end of course it boils down to one's personal taste.
Indeed it does! Mine is for a cider with perceptible apple flavor
and aroma, smooth mouthfeel, full body, and soft complex
bitterness. I never got that back when I followed the oft-cited
advice to use plenty of tart apples; all I got was thin, sharp
ciders. After malo-lactic fermentation they got better, but it
wasn't until I started measuring titratable acidity and using
cider fruit that I started getting really great ciders. The best
of these came from syrupy-sweet juices, with OG around 1060 and TA
around 0.3%.
But obviously not everyone shares my tastes, because there are
commercial ciders made from Granny Smith apples, and I find that
stuff undrinkable. Out here in California there is a commercial
cider made from Gravensteins and I don't think it tastes very
good, either, but a lot of people drink it.
My taste runs with the long established tradition of using plenty
of tart apples in the cider blend. Doing otherwise results,
frankly, in a pretty lackluster cider.
The long established traditions rely on apples cultivated
specifically for cider production. These have very different
haracteristics than table fruit - similar to the difference
between table grapes and wine grapes. The traditional blending is
a mix of sweet, bittersweet, and sharp (or bittersharp) apples.
The sweet and bittersweet have very low acidity and are frequently
all but inedible; the sharps allow adjustment of acidity while
contributing complexity and flavor. Table fruit on the other hand
is generally sweet/sharp with no detectable bitterness. Frankly I
find all ciders made from table fruit lackluster, but I'm spoiled
by my own product.
Cheers,
Tim in Albion, CA
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Date: Wed, 1 Sep 2010 12:18:48 -0500
From: Joe Dunne <jrdunne at hotmail.com>
Subject: RE: Mmmm! Cider!
BR and Pat mention reducing the volume before putting
the cider in the rear of the fridge to ferment.
Should I assume that you simply pour out a glass or
two?
I'm guessing this is not a "reduction" in the fashion
of making a reduction sauce.
Thanks,
Joe Dunne
Chicago, North Side
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End of HOMEBREW Digest #5726, 09/01/10
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